News and Perspectives from Pacific Gas and Electric Company

Technology

In this PG&E Perspectives, Chief Communications Officer Tim Fitzpatrick writes about a keynote speech given today by PG&E President Chris Johns about the Grid of Things.”PG&E is very excited about what the future holds for the people we serve,” Fitzpatrick says.

For nearly 200 employees who make up the company’s IT Telecom Maintenance and Construction organizations, a day in the life includes maintaining more than 480 microwave terminals, hundreds of telecom rooms that support all of the company’s network and telecom services, and providing emergency response for more than 3,000 miles of fiber optic cable that support electric, gas and telecom operational needs.

The FIRST Robotics Regional Competition, which runs through Sunday in Madera, gives students a glimpse of future careers. PG&E is a major sponsor of the event that draws teams from across the Central Valley.

Today, representatives from PG&E’s Electric Vegetation Management department made a presentation to the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection on drought response initiatives the utility completed in 2014, and gave a brief overview of goals for this year.

Safety is at the heart of everything PG&E does. And that includes the rubber gloves used by linemen who restore and upgrade electric lines. In Emeryville, a small team is responsible for making sure those rubber gloves are free of defects before being used in the field.

PG&E has asked state regulators for permission to build an estimated 25,000 electric vehicle (EV) chargers at sites across its service area in Northern and Central California. If approved, this program would be the largest deployment of EV charging stations in the country.

PG&E reminds its customers that power outages may occur due to wet and windy weather forecast to begin Thursday and last through the weekend, the first major rainfall in the utility’s service area since two powerful December storms.

PG&E recently received CPUC permission to start the second phase of a multi-year smart grid pilot project that seeks to reduce customer energy usage and losses along electric lines, lower customer bills, support the continued adoption of rooftop solar, and spare the environment.Those benefits are a lot sexier than the geeky name of the technology: “voltage and reactive power optimization” or “conservation voltage reduction.” Whatever you call it, as Jonathan Marshall writes in this NEXT100 blog, “the technology is likely to become one of the most popular energy efficiency and demand response measures among North American utilities before the end of 2020.”

In his PG&E Perspectives, Tim Fitzpatrick writes that the combination of the tireless work of electric and gas crews and new technologies allow for a speedier response to outages caused by winter storms and natural disasters such as earthquakes.

In a foreword to a new book detailing case studies highlighting grid modernization, PG&E President Chris Johns writes that the grid of the future “serves as the platform to interconnect and enable all of the emerging energy technologies our customers want to pursue — in other words, a ‘grid of things.’ ”

A PG&E pilot project is helping customers learn about the energy consumption of individual appliances in their homes. As Jonathan Marshall writes in his NEXT100 blog, an inefficient refrigerator can consume $60 more energy than a newer model.